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Have you ever wondered
what animals think and feel?

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Let's start with a question:

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Does my dog really love me,
or does she just want a treat?

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Well, it's easy to see
that our dog really loves us,

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easy to see, right,

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what's going on in that fuzzy little head.

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What is going on?

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Something's going on.

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But why is the question always
do they love us?

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Why is it always about us?

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Why are we such narcissists?

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I found a different question
to ask animals.

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Who are you?

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There are capacities of the human mind

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that we tend to think are capacities
only of the human mind.

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But is that true?

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What are other beings
doing with those brains?

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What are they thinking and feeling?

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Is there a way to know?

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I think there is a way in.

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I think there are several ways in.

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We can look at evolution,
we can look at their brains

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and we can watch what they do.

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The first thing to remember is:
our brain is inherited.

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The first neurons came from jellyfish.

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Jellyfish gave rise
to the first chordates.

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The first chordates gave rise
to the first vertebrates.

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The vertebrates came out of the sea,

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and here we are.

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But it's still true that a neuron,
a nerve cell, looks the same

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in a crayfish, a bird or you.

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What does that say
about the minds of crayfish?

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Can we tell anything about that?

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Well, it turns out that
if you give a crayfish

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a lot of little tiny electric shocks

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every time it tries
to come out of its burrow,

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it will develop anxiety.

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If you give the crayfish the same drug

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used to treat anxiety disorder in humans,

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it relaxes and comes out and explores.

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How do we show how much
we care about crayfish anxiety?

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Mostly, we boil them.

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(Laughter)

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Octopuses use tools,
as well as do most apes

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and they recognize human faces.

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How do we celebrate the ape-like
intelligence of this invertebrate?

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Mostly boiled.

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If a grouper chases a fish
into a crevice in the coral,

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it will sometimes go to where it knows
a moray eel is sleeping

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and it will signal
to the moray, "Follow me,"

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and the moray will understand that signal.

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The moray may go into the crevice
and get the fish,

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but the fish may bolt
and the grouper may get it.

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This is an ancient partnership that we
have just recently found out about.

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How do we celebrate
that ancient partnership?

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Mostly fried.

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A pattern is emerging and it says
a lot more about us

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than it does about them.

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Sea otters use tools

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and they take time away
from what they're doing

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to show their babies what to do,
which is called teaching.

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Chimpanzees don't teach.

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Killer whales teach
and killer whales share food.

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When evolution makes something new,

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it uses the parts it has
in stock, off the shelf,

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before it fabricates a new twist.

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And our brain has come to us

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through the enormity
of the deep sweep of time.

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If you look at the human brain
compared to a chimpanzee brain,

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what you see is we have basically
a very big chimpanzee brain.

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It's a good thing ours is bigger,
because we're also really insecure.

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(Laughter)

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But, uh oh, there's a dolphin,

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a bigger brain with more convolutions.

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OK, maybe you're saying,
all right, well, we see brains,

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but what does that
have to say about minds?

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Well, we can see the working of the mind

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in the logic of behaviors.

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So these elephants, you can see,

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obviously, they are resting.

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They have found a patch of shade
under the palm trees

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under which to let their babies sleep,

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while they doze but remain vigilant.

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We make perfect sense of that image

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just as they make perfect sense
of what they're doing

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because under the arc of the same sun
on the same plains,

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listening to the howls
of the same dangers,

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they became who they are
and we became who we are.

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We've been neighbors for a very long time.

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No one would mistake
these elephants as being relaxed.

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They're obviously very
concerned about something.

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What are they concerned about?

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It turns out that if you record
the voices of tourists

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and you play that recording
from a speaker hidden in bushes,

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elephants will ignore it,
because tourists never bother elephants.

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But if you record the voices of herders

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who carry spears and often hurt elephants
in confrontations at water holes,

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the elephants will bunch up
and run away from the hidden speaker.

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Not only do elephants know
that there are humans,

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they know that there are
different kinds of humans,

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and that some are OK
and some are dangerous.

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They have been watching us for much longer
than we have been watching them.

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They know us better than we know them.

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We have the same imperatives:

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take care of our babies,
find food, try to stay alive.

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Whether we're outfitted for hiking
in the hills of Africa

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or outfitted for diving under the sea,
we are basically the same.

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We are kin under the skin.

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The elephant has the same skeleton,

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the killer whale has the same skeleton,

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as do we.

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We see helping where help is needed.

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We see curiosity in the young.

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We see the bonds of family connections.

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We recognize affection.

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Courtship is courtship.

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And then we ask, "Are they conscious?"

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When you get general anesthesia,
it makes you unconscious,

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which means you have
no sensation of anything.

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Consciousness is simply
the thing that feels like something.

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If you see, if you hear, if you feel,
if you're aware of anything,

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you are conscious, and they are conscious.

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Some people say

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well, there are certain things
that make humans humans,

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and one of those things is empathy.

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Empathy is the mind's ability
to match moods with your companions.

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It's a very useful thing.

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If your companions start to move quickly,

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you have to feel like
you need to hurry up.

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We're all in a hurry now.

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The oldest form of empathy
is contagious fear.

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If your companions suddenly
startle and fly away,

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it does not work very well for you to say,

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"Jeez, I wonder why everybody just left."

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(Laughter)

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Empathy is old, but empathy,
like everything else in life,

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comes on a sliding scale
and has its elaboration.

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So there's basic empathy:
you feel sad, it makes me sad.

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I see you happy, it makes me happy.

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Then there's something
that I call sympathy,

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a little more removed:

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"I'm sorry to hear that your grandmother
has just passed away.

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I don't feel that same grief,
but I get it; I know what you feel

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and it concerns me."

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And then if we're motivated
to act on sympathy,

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I call that compassion.

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Far from being the thing
that makes us human,

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human empathy is far from perfect.

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We round up empathic creatures,
we kill them and we eat them.

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Now, maybe you say OK,
well, those are different species.

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That's just predation,
and humans are predators.

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But we don't treat our own kind
too well either.

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People who seem to know
only one thing about animal behavior

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know that you must never attribute
human thoughts and emotions

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to other species.

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Well, I think that's silly,

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because attributing human thoughts
and emotions to other species

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is the best first guess about what
they're doing and how they're feeling,

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because their brains
are basically the same as ours.

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They have the same structures.

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The same hormones that create
mood and motivation in us

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are in those brains as well.

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It is not scientific to say that they
are hungry when they're hunting

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and they're tired when
their tongues are hanging out,

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and then say when they're playing
with their children

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and acting joyful and happy,

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we have no idea if they can possibly
be experiencing anything.

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That is not scientific.

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So OK, so a reporter said to me,

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"Maybe, but how do you really know
that other animals can think and feel?"

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And I started to rifle
through all the hundreds

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of scientific references
that I put in my book

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and I realized that the answer
was right in the room with me.

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When my dog gets off the rug
and comes over to me --

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not to the couch, to me --

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and she rolls over on her back
and exposes her belly,

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she has had the thought,
"I would like my belly rubbed.

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I know that I can go over to Carl,

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he will understand what I'm asking.

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I know I can trust him
because we're family.

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He'll get the job done,
and it will feel good."

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(Laughter)

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She has thought and she has felt,

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and it's really not
more complicated than that.

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But we see other animals
and we say, "Oh look, killer whales,

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wolves, elephants:

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that's not how they see it."

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That tall-finned male is L41.

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He's 38 years old.

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The female right on his left side is L22.

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She's 44.

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They've known each other for decades.

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They know exactly who they are.

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They know who their friends are.

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They know who their rivals are.

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Their life follows the arc of a career.

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They know where they are all the time.

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This is an elephant named Philo.

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He was a young male.

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This is him four days later.

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Humans not only can feel grief,
we create an awful lot of it.

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We want to carve their teeth.

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Why can't we wait for them to die?

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Elephants once ranged from the shores
of the Mediterranean Sea

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all the way down to the Cape of Good Hope.

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In 1980, there were vast
strongholds of elephant range

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in Central and Eastern Africa.

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And now their range is shattered
into little shards.

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This is the geography of an animal
that we are driving to extinction,

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a fellow being, the most
magnificent creature on land.

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Of course, we take much better care
of our wildlife in the United States.

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In Yellowstone National Park,
we killed every single wolf.

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We killed every single wolf
south of the Canadian border, actually.

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But in the park, park rangers
did that in the 1920s,

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and then 60 years later
they had to bring them back,

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because the elk numbers
had gotten out of control.

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And then people came.

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People came by the thousands
to see the wolves,

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the most accessibly
visible wolves in the world.

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And I went there and I watched
this incredible family of wolves.

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A pack is a family.

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It has some breeding adults
and the young of several generations.

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And I watched the most famous, most stable
pack in Yellowstone National Park.

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And then, when they wandered
just outside the border,

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two of their adults were killed,

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including the mother,

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which we sometimes call the alpha female.

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The rest of the family immediately
descended into sibling rivalry.

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Sisters kicked out other sisters.

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That one on the left tried for days
to rejoin her family.

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They wouldn't let her
because they were jealous of her.

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She was getting too much attention
from two new males,

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and she was the precocious one.

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That was too much for them.

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She wound up wandering
outside the park and getting shot.

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The alpha male wound up
being ejected from his own family.

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As winter was coming in,

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he lost his territory,
his hunting support,

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the members of his family and his mate.

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We cause so much pain to them.

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The mystery is, why don't
they hurt us more than they do?

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This whale had just finished eating
part of a grey whale

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with his companions
who had killed that whale.

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Those people in the boat
had nothing at all to fear.

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This whale is T20.

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He had just finished tearing a seal
into three pieces with two companions.

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00:14:07,168 --> 00:14:09,860
The seal weighed about as much
as the people in the boat.

248
00:14:09,884 --> 00:14:11,387
They had nothing to fear.

249
00:14:12,189 --> 00:14:13,611
They eat seals.

250
00:14:14,699 --> 00:14:16,385
Why don't they eat us?

251
00:14:18,823 --> 00:14:22,583
Why can we trust them around our toddlers?

252
00:14:24,488 --> 00:14:30,390
Why is it that killer whales have returned
to researchers lost in thick fog

253
00:14:30,414 --> 00:14:33,744
and led them miles until the fog parted

254
00:14:33,768 --> 00:14:36,933
and the researchers' home
was right there on the shoreline?

255
00:14:36,957 --> 00:14:38,973
And that's happened more than one time.

256
00:14:41,171 --> 00:14:43,746
In the Bahamas, there's a woman
named Denise Herzing,

257
00:14:43,770 --> 00:14:47,094
and she studies spotted dolphins
and they know her.

258
00:14:47,118 --> 00:14:49,716
She knows them very well.
She knows who they all are.

259
00:14:49,740 --> 00:14:52,002
They know her.
They recognize the research boat.

260
00:14:52,026 --> 00:14:54,256
When she shows up,
it's a big happy reunion.

261
00:14:54,280 --> 00:14:57,595
Except, one time showed up and they
didn't want to come near the boat,

262
00:14:57,619 --> 00:14:59,693
and that was really strange.

263
00:14:59,717 --> 00:15:01,881
And they couldn't figure out
what was going on

264
00:15:01,905 --> 00:15:03,405
until somebody came out on deck

265
00:15:03,429 --> 00:15:06,064
and announced that one
of the people onboard had died

266
00:15:06,088 --> 00:15:07,859
during a nap in his bunk.

267
00:15:08,740 --> 00:15:12,666
How could dolphins know
that one of the human hearts

268
00:15:12,690 --> 00:15:14,159
had just stopped?

269
00:15:14,818 --> 00:15:17,108
Why would they care?

270
00:15:17,132 --> 00:15:19,325
And why would it spook them?

271
00:15:21,111 --> 00:15:26,410
These mysterious things just hint at
all of the things that are going on

272
00:15:26,434 --> 00:15:29,176
in the minds that are with us on Earth

273
00:15:29,200 --> 00:15:33,431
that we almost never think about at all.

274
00:15:34,258 --> 00:15:36,430
At an aquarium in South Africa

275
00:15:36,454 --> 00:15:39,678
was a little baby bottle-nosed
dolphin named Dolly.

276
00:15:40,178 --> 00:15:46,322
She was nursing, and one day
a keeper took a cigarette break

277
00:15:46,346 --> 00:15:50,453
and he was looking into the window
into their pool, smoking.

278
00:15:50,477 --> 00:15:52,851
Dolly came over and looked at him,

279
00:15:52,875 --> 00:15:56,753
went back to her mother,
nursed for a minute or two,

280
00:15:56,777 --> 00:15:58,580
came back to the window

281
00:15:58,604 --> 00:16:04,269
and released a cloud of milk
that enveloped her head like smoke.

282
00:16:04,293 --> 00:16:07,399
Somehow, this baby bottle-nosed dolphin

283
00:16:07,423 --> 00:16:11,712
got the idea of using milk
to represent smoke.

284
00:16:12,211 --> 00:16:15,559
When human beings use one thing
to represent another,

285
00:16:15,583 --> 00:16:17,608
we call that art.

286
00:16:17,632 --> 00:16:19,655
(Laughter)

287
00:16:19,679 --> 00:16:21,210
The things that make us human

288
00:16:21,234 --> 00:16:24,314
are not the things
that we think make us human.

289
00:16:24,781 --> 00:16:27,105
What makes us human is that,

290
00:16:27,129 --> 00:16:30,265
of all these things that our minds
and their minds have,

291
00:16:30,289 --> 00:16:32,529
we are the most extreme.

292
00:16:34,347 --> 00:16:36,636
We are the most compassionate,

293
00:16:36,660 --> 00:16:39,677
most violent, most creative

294
00:16:39,701 --> 00:16:44,361
and most destructive animal
that has ever been on this planet,

295
00:16:44,385 --> 00:16:48,109
and we are all of those things
all jumbled up together.

296
00:16:49,341 --> 00:16:53,579
But love is not the thing
that makes us human.

297
00:16:54,242 --> 00:16:56,594
It's not special to us.

298
00:16:57,674 --> 00:17:01,645
We are not the only ones
who care about our mates.

299
00:17:01,669 --> 00:17:05,007
We are not the only ones
who care about our children.

300
00:17:06,904 --> 00:17:11,874
Albatrosses frequently fly six,
sometimes ten thousand miles

301
00:17:11,898 --> 00:17:16,385
over several weeks to deliver
one meal, one big meal,

302
00:17:16,409 --> 00:17:18,385
to their chick who is waiting for them.

303
00:17:18,835 --> 00:17:23,233
They nest on the most remote islands
in the oceans of the world,

304
00:17:23,257 --> 00:17:25,630
and this is what it looks like.

305
00:17:27,370 --> 00:17:31,550
Passing life from one generation
to the next is the chain of being.

306
00:17:31,574 --> 00:17:34,550
If that stops, it all goes away.

307
00:17:34,975 --> 00:17:39,625
If anything is sacred, that is,
and into that sacred relationship

308
00:17:39,649 --> 00:17:42,480
comes our plastic trash.

309
00:17:42,504 --> 00:17:45,191
All of these birds
have plastic in them now.

310
00:17:45,990 --> 00:17:50,641
This is an albatross six months old,
ready to fledge --

311
00:17:50,665 --> 00:17:54,666
died, packed with red cigarette lighters.

312
00:17:54,690 --> 00:17:57,975
This is not the relationship
we are supposed to have

313
00:17:57,999 --> 00:17:59,585
with the rest of the world.

314
00:17:59,609 --> 00:18:02,933
But we, who have named
ourselves after our brains,

315
00:18:04,195 --> 00:18:07,581
never think about the consequences.

316
00:18:09,041 --> 00:18:12,161
When we welcome new
human life into the world,

317
00:18:12,185 --> 00:18:16,688
we welcome our babies
into the company of other creatures.

318
00:18:16,712 --> 00:18:18,805
We paint animals on the walls.

319
00:18:18,829 --> 00:18:20,657
We don't paint cell phones.

320
00:18:20,681 --> 00:18:22,824
We don't paint work cubicles.

321
00:18:22,848 --> 00:18:26,749
We paint animals to show them
that we are not alone.

322
00:18:27,316 --> 00:18:29,059
We have company.

323
00:18:30,527 --> 00:18:35,267
And every one of those animals
in every painting of Noah's ark,

324
00:18:35,291 --> 00:18:39,631
deemed worthy of salvation
is in mortal danger now,

325
00:18:39,655 --> 00:18:41,908
and their flood is us.

326
00:18:43,704 --> 00:18:46,003
So we started with a question:

327
00:18:46,027 --> 00:18:47,891
Do they love us?

328
00:18:49,999 --> 00:18:52,047
We're going to ask another question.

329
00:18:52,999 --> 00:18:56,609
Are we capable of using what we have

330
00:18:57,918 --> 00:19:02,091
to care enough to simply
let them continue?

331
00:19:04,725 --> 00:19:06,066
Thank you very much.

332
00:19:06,090 --> 00:19:11,730
(Applause)